CNN
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The Republican Congress that began its first full week of work on Monday is already operating on borrowed time – unless the GOP can defy one of the most powerful patterns of recent US politics.
Republicans begin the year in Washington at high tide, with unified control, after Donald Trump takes office on January 20, of the White House, the House and the Senate. But the past five times a president went into a midterm election with unified control of government, voters have revoked it. No president has maintained control of both congressional chambers through a midterm election since Jimmy Carter in 1978.
Unless Republicans can break that streak in 2026, that means Trump and his Congressional allies will have only two years to pass their most significant legislation – the same squeeze that has confronted, and constricted, presidents now for decades. Susie Wiles, Trump’s incoming White House chief of staff, appeared to implicitly acknowledge that reality in an interview with Axios released on Monday, when she described the two years between his inauguration and the 2026 midterms as the critical period for advancing his agenda.
The inability of both parties to maintain unified control through a midterm election for such a long period is unprecedented in American political history. Prior to the recent experience, the most consecutive times a party went into a midterm with unified control of government and lost it was four. Those losing streaks occurred during two separate periods of maximum political instability in the 19th century.
The shorter shelf life of unified government in modern times has almost without notice shaped behavior in both the White House and Congress – subtly discouraging bipartisan compromise and pushing the majority party to stuff the top priorities of each incoming president into one massive legislative package, as Republicans are poised to attempt again this year. The current run also stamps our modern period as another era shaped by the incapacity of either party to establish a lasting advantage over the other, despite the repeated hopes of each newly elected president that his victory signals the beginning of a lasting realignment.
The rapid and severe shifts in advantage between the two parties have become so head-spinning that “you need a neck brace now to observe American electoral politics,” said Steve Israel, a former Democratic representative from New York who chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Each time a party takes power with unified control of government, it hopes to break this pattern of rapid turnover. But, as Wiles’ comments suggest, there’s a growing recognition that they probably will not. “The basic expectation has shifted in the modern era,” said David Price, a political scientist and former Democratic representative from North Carolina.
Even when it is not explicitly discussed, that shifting expectation has changed behavior in both the majority party holding unified control and the minority party hoping to dislodge them, Price and other analysts told me. “You are making decisions knowing that the tide is going to change,” said Israel.
For one thing, Price said, more senior members who might have considered retirement in an earlier era when they fall into the minority are now more willing to stick around on the expectation that they will soon hold the gavels again. “It kept me going, and I don’t think I’m atypical,” Price, who retired from Congress two years ago, said. “In the first two Trump years, our whole leadership … was all at the point where we might ride off into the sunset and we decided just the opposite because we anticipated correctly there was going to be one hell of a midterm. That was a major incentive in terms of our planning of our own careers.”
The willingness of so many members to run again while in the minority, Price added, can become “a self-fulfilling prophecy” because it provides a party with strong candidates and reduces the number of open seats they must defend. “The fact that Democrats were confident and signing up for another round was a factor in helping us get there,” he said.
The frequency of turnover has also discouraged the minority party from cooperating with the majority party, especially in the House. When Democrats held their unbroken 40-year House majority from 1955 to 1994, Republican leaders, such as Robert Michel of Illinois, routinely worked with the majority to influence their legislation. Now, both parties are less interested in working with and influencing the other party’s legislation than displacing them and writing their own.
“This recent history is informing attitudes and planning on Capitol Hill,” Israel said. “It used to be you’d go to Congress, you’d find a friend on the other side of the aisle, you had a long term view. Now no matter what happens, the prevailing sense (is) we just have to wait it out for another two years” before winning the majority again.
The opposite dynamic is evident in the behavior of the majority parties during this era of more fragile control. Almost always over the past few decades, during a new president’s first two years, the party holding unified control has sought to cram as many of its highest priorities as possible into the special legislative tool known as reconciliation. When using reconciliation, the majority party doesn’t need to win any support from the minority party because it can be passed with a simple majority in both chambers. Ordinarily the Senate’s majority party – unless it holds at least 60 seats – would need to negotiate with the minority party to break a filibuster; but a reconciliation bill cannot be filibustered, which eliminates the necessity of compromising with the minority. Reconciliation was the mechanism the party holding unified control used to pass the Bush and Trump tax cuts, as well as Obama’s Affordable Care Act and Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act – and it’s the tool Republican leaders are planning to rely upon again this year to advance Trump’s top priorities on taxes, energy, immigration and spending cuts. (At times, presidents have recorded bipartisan achievements while holding unified control, such as Biden’s infrastructure and semiconductor production bills, but those have been the exception.)
The heightened risk of losing unified control, and with it the ability to drive legislation, in the next midterm election after a presidential victory has become a valuable lever for presidents hoping to corral recalcitrant legislators behind their agenda, Price said. “There was the sense we damn well better get it done in those first two years and that added all kinds of urgency and focus to our legislative efforts,” he said. “That’s not all bad. Congress needs forcing mechanisms and this is a major one: that you may be out of power next year.”
Louisa Terrell, who served as Biden’s first White House legislative director and the deputy director for Obama, said that both administrations were keenly aware that unified control of government had grown more fragile. “There was not a consistent dialogue with a specific expiration date – that we had to get this done by ‘X date,’” she said. “But the conversation (with legislators) was we have no time to waste and that we have to try to see what can work in this time frame.”
Former Republican Virginia Rep. Tom Davis, who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee, said that unified control encouraged more party discipline through another mechanism: eliminating excuses for inaction. “When you control everything,” he said, “everybody who’s mad about anything knows who is to blame.”
The risk of alienating a coalition’s base voters, he said, is especially acute when leaders cannot blame divided control of Congress for any failures to pass a top party priority. For the Republicans who will hold unified control after Trump’s inauguration later this month, Davis said, “Politically, the worst thing would be to get this and not produce, because when your base collapses, everything goes.” That will likely be a major argument for Republican leaders this year, he adds, particularly as they try to corral their razor-thin House majority behind what will likely be a sprawling reconciliation bill.
The shorter lifespan of governments with unified party control is a modern phenomenon. Through the heart of the 20th century, it was much more common for either party to enjoy longer periods holding both the White House and Congress. That allowed them more time to pass their agenda, cement their priorities into law and lastingly reshape the country’s direction.
Overall, from 1896 through 1968, one party or the other simultaneously held the White House, the House and the Senate for 58 of those 72 years. Twice over that span one party maintained unified control of Washington for 14 consecutive years (Republicans around the turn of the 20th century under William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft and Democrats during the Depression and World War II under Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman); Republicans controlled all the branches in Washington for the entire decade of the 1920s and Democrats did so behind Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson through most of the 1960s.
Since then, though, it has become far more difficult for either side to establish unified control of the White House and Congress – and much harder to defend it when they do. Even counting the next two years in which Republicans will exercise complete control over Washington, by 2026, one party or the other will have held unified control for just 18 of the past 58 years.
Holding unified control of Congress and the White House through a midterm election has become virtually impossible for both parties. Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, as well as Trump in his first victory, all had the same experience: Each man was elected with unified control of the House and Senate but lost the House two years later in his first midterm (in 1994 for Clinton, 2010 for Obama, 2018 for Trump and 2022 for Biden.) Clinton also lost the Senate.
George W. Bush’s experience represents the slight variation on the theme. He, too, was elected president with unified control of the House and Senate in 2000. But the GOP at that point had only a 50-50 Senate majority and lost control of the chamber a few months into Bush’s term when Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords quit the Republican Party to declare himself an independent; that shifted the Senate majority to the Democrats.
As a result, Bush headed into the 2002 midterm without unified control of Congress. Republicans in that election held the House and won back the Senate, and preserved their majorities in both chambers in the 2004 presidential election. But in the 2006 election, the first time Bush went into a midterm with unified control, Democrats swept to the majorities in both the House and Senate.
Thus, each of the past five times a president went into a midterm with unified control of Congress, voters have revoked it.
Two moments of maximum political instability during the 19th century provide the only precedent when unified control of government was as fleeting as it has been since the 1990s. As the country careered into the Civil War during the mid-19th century, presidents were elected with unified control of Congress in 1840, 1844, 1852 and 1856 – and then promptly lost it two years later. (In 1848, Whig President Zachary Taylor never had unified control of Congress.) That streak was broken when Abraham Lincoln, and his newly formed Republican Party, maintained unified control in the 1862 election, the first midterm after his victory in 1860 (and in the middle of the Civil War).
The other longest streak of instability came during the Gilded Age in the late 19th century. Presidents from both parties were elected with unified control of Congress in 1872, 1880, 1888 and 1892 – and again all lost it two years later. (The presidents elected in 1876 and 1884 never had unified control.) That streak was broken when Republicans defended their unified control in 1898, two years after the election of President William McKinley (who Trump has lately cited as a role model).
What both those 19th century periods of instability have in common is that they each unfolded while neither party appeared capable of resolving the biggest challenge facing the country: the slide toward Civil War in the first case, and the severe strains created by industrialization and urbanization in the second.
Observers attribute the modern fragility of unified control partly to the same dynamic – the inability of either party to convince voters they can resolve the country’s biggest problems, particularly the long-term strain on the living standards of average families that dates back to the 1970s.
Israel, like other analysts, notes that most US elections since 2006 – both presidential and midterm contests – have essentially reversed the outcome of the election two years before. Voters, for instance, gave Democrats big House and Senate majorities behind Obama in 2008, then turned sharply toward the GOP in the 2010 “tea party” landslide, before shifting back to Obama in 2012 and then tilting toward Republicans again in 2014.
“It’s the unique convergence of voter anxiety, economic insecurity and overall instability,” Israel said. “Voters are just looking for a solution, and every two years they think the solution they chose two years before isn’t working.”
Rising political polarization has also intensified this instability in two distinct respects. The widening gap between the policy priorities of the two parties, many political analysts believe, has compounded the risk that when either party has unified control, it will advance an agenda too extreme to maintain support among the remaining swing voters in the electorate.
“Generally, voters in midterms vote to put a check on the president rather than giving him a blank check, because presidents and parties tend to overread their mandates,” Davis said. “When you move past the voters too quickly, they will put the brakes on.”
The other way polarization has undermined unified control is by systematically shrinking the size of congressional majorities. Because so many states and congressional districts are now seemingly locked down for each party, even in favorable elections, both sides typically have been able to secure only very narrow majorities. Only three times in the 21st century has either party held at least 55 Senate seats; that compares to seven times either reached that threshold in the 10 Congresses from 1980 to 2000. The current Republican House majority of 220 seats (which could shrink further in special elections coming this spring) is the smallest in nearly a century, and follows back-to-back 222 seat majorities for Democrats and Republicans from 2021-2024. “The days of 30-vote majorities,” said Israel, “are probably over for the time being.”
Even the parties that successfully defended unified control in the past usually suffered losses in the House and Senate during midterm elections; the difference for them was that their majorities were big enough that they could lose some seats and maintain control. Now the parties have almost no cushion to sustain losses and preserve control, especially in the House.
Trump and the GOP House and Senate leadership teams presiding over their party’s slim majorities are the latest leaders trying to navigate this obstacle course. They begin by expressing optimism that if they deliver on their agenda, they can break the recent streak of voters rescinding unified control from every president who has carried it into a midterm for the past three decades. But, in either party, very few people will be surprised in two years if they cannot.
